04 May 2009

Questions That Answer

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From Donald T. Williams on the pages of Touchstone magazine:

Christianity is true. This being so, you would expect to see evidence of its truth staring you in the face everywhere you turn. So why do so many people miss it? Part of the secret is learning to ask the right questions. For example:

If God isn't there, then why is the world there? If the universe is just matter and energy evolving by chance, why has it bothered to evolve at all? Why hasn't it already run down into a pool of useless entropy? Why does it behave so consistently? If things just happen by chance, why are all the natural laws the same today as they were yesterday?

Why do we want things to make sense? Where did the notion of sense come from? If intelligence and order were not put into the universe from the outside, how did they get here? If matter is such neat stuff that it has the tendency to evolve intelligence all by itself, why has it evolved a life form whose intelligence only serves to keep it from feeling at home in the cosmos that gave rise to it? Why does that life form have aspirations for love, meaning, purpose, and immortality, all of which are unfulfillable, indeed, meaningless, in a universe in which matter and energy are the ultimate reference point?

Why does the universe make sense only up to a point? Why does that fact bother us?

None of these questions is answerable from outside the biblical worldview. The postmodern generation is suspicious of people with answers. So maybe,f irst, we should just be people with questions. Hey, it works on Jeopardy!


This reminds me of the chorus of the song Could It Be on the album Present Reality by Michael Card:

Could it be You make Your presence known
So often by Your absence?
Could it be the questions tell us more
Than answers ever do?
Could it be that You would really
Rather die than live without us?
Could it be the only answer that means anything
Is You?

To sum up: ? = !

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